Abstract: The paper presents an explorative study of Open Source Software (OSS) focusing on the managerial decisions for acquisition of OSS. Based on three case studies we argue that whereas small organizations often may chose adoption of OSS expecting significant cost savings, a major barrier for larger organizations’ adoption of OSS lies in the organizations’ consolidation of the enterprise architectures, in addition to that OSS will not be adopted before satisfactory delivery and procurement models for OSS are established.
Keywords: Open Source Software, OSS, Enterprise Architecture, Total Cost of Ownership, Delivery and Procurement Model.

Standards have proven themselves indispensable to the industrial revolution. How are standards developed today? What does the economics of standards tell about the impact of standards upon economic growth and productivity? Do standards influence industry innovation? How are the standardization processes in the field of ICT taking place? How and why do open standards differ from other types of standards? How may open standards influence ICT government policy and the reverse: How will government need to take action in the face of the international trend toward open standards in ICT?

The main research interest in Open Source Software (OSS) has been in answering the questions of why individuals and organizations without economic compensation contribute to OSS projects and how these projects are organized. In this paper we instead focus on managerial decisions for acquisition of OSS and discuss potential barriers for widespread use of OSS. Based on existing literature and a small case study, we develop and discuss the hypothesis that a major barrier may be the "customer" organizations’ uncertainty and unfamiliarity with the relationships with OSS "vendors". To develop viable models for these relationships is an important challenge, which we will deal with in a research project, of which this paper should be seen as a first step.

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Lately we have seen a growing interest from both public and private organisations to adopt Open
Source Software (OSS), not only for a few, specific applications but also on a more general level
throughout the organisation. As a consequence, the organisations’ decisions on adoption of OSS are
becoming increasingly more important and complex. We present three perspectives organisations can
employ in their decisions: seeing OSS acquisition as a business case, as COTS acquisition, and as architectural
change within a governance framework. We present case studies of decisions on OSS
adoption, and categorise the decision criteria we have found. Our results indicate that for large-scale
adoption of OSS, focus will be on architectural considerations: enterprise-wide architectures will at
first be a barrier, but in the long term OSS’s support of open standards can be a major enabler for
OSS adoption. In contrast, in smaller organisations and in small-scale adoption of OSS, the cheap
price of OSS is a major enabler, as it provides a good opportunity for experiments and short-term
economic benefits. For small organisations these experiments can lead to development of a common
IT-architecture, and in larger organisations OSS can be adopted in niche-areas, without significantly
violating an existing IT-architecture.
Keywords: open source, COTS, IT architecture, governance

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In globalizing competitive markets knowledge exchange
between business organizations requires incentive
mechanisms to ensure tactical purposes while strategic
purposes are subject to joint organization and other
forms of contractual obligations. Where property of
knowledge (e.g. patents and copyrights) and contractbased
knowledge exchange do not obtain network
effectiveness because of prohibitive transaction costs in
reducing uncertainty, we suggest a robust model for peer
produced knowledge within a distributed setting. The
peer produced knowledge exchange model relies upon a
double loop knowledge conversion with symmetric
incentives in a network since the production of actor
specific knowledge makes any knowledge appropriation
by use of property rights by the actors irrelevant. Without
property rights in knowledge the actor network generates
opportunity for incentive symmetry over a period of time.
The model merges specific knowledge with knowledge
from other actors into a decision support system specific
for each actor in the network in recognition of actor role
differences. The article suggests a set of 9 static and 5
dynamic propositions for the model to maintain
symmetric incentives between different actor networks.
The model is proposed for business networks.